No matter what industry you are in, your company will benefit from having effective tools in place to handle your customer service. This is particularly true for online retailers during peak times.
High Street closures during lockdown saw increased focus and reliance on online sales, sparking further demand for customer engagement software that can deal with multi-channel customer conversations. It has become imperative that customer support teams have the tools to be able to answer customer queries quickly, reduce customer frustration and ensure that poor experience does not impact on sales.
Here’s how Zendesk Messaging can help your company navigate online customer service to free up your agents’ time for more important issues and reduce customer waiting times during peak trading.
Giving customers choice in how they find answers
Technology should solve problems for you. What those problems are may vary by industry and what is trying to be achieved, but there are also universal problems that every company can resolve with intelligent customer service software – namely, how to give the consumer a choice in how to communicate with you.
There are various levels of interaction companies can offer online: from question and answer processes in a range of interactive channels to a full live chat with a human agent. Zendesk Messaging offers a fluid mixture of both the virtual and human.
Every customer’s online shopping experience really should be simple and painless – particularly if you want repeat business in the future. Giving customers the power to choose how they interact is integral to this.
Having a Messaging framework populated with content and data that an Answer Bot can draw from is the place to begin, as this allows smart search functions to provide relevant responses across a multitude of different channels. Your customers will be thrilled at having the ability to quickly and efficiently receive an answer to their query, leading to improved customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
Freeing up time for human agents
Freeing up time for agents is important at the best of times, but is even more critical at Peak. By covering the basics with an interactive Answer Bot, agents won’t have to spend precious minutes or hours on conversations that can be auto-answered elsewhere in an app or on an online store.
For example, using the Zendesk Flow Builder to build predefined workflows that answer common questions allows relevant information to be suggested based on keywords typed or from options presented to the customer.
The goal is to filter the repeat questions your company receives before an agent gets involved. Things like:
- What are your delivery costs?
- When will my delivery arrive?
- How do I return an item?
- Are you open on Sundays?
- Are you having a Black Friday sale?
- Do you deliver internationally?
These questions only become more prevalent during Peak, so having the ability to administer automated solutions, or directions to the solutions, can be a huge time saver. Employees should still be available to provide a feel good factor and represent the company, but not for repetitive responses to simple questions.
Escalating to human agents – but only when necessary
Automating responses to common questions from website visitors is just the tip of the iceberg. Zendesk Messaging can smoothly transition from an Answer Bot that offers simple and immediate solutions to a human agent who can provide more complex support should a query require further escalation.
Customers often want to simply ask a question and have an agent solve their problem, whereas agents may require customers to provide more information so they can do their jobs effectively. Zendesk Messaging bridges this gap between the two by providing easy answers for customers and giving experienced agents access to information gleaned by an Answer Bot, so they can solve a problem or begin triage if and when a ticket is opened.
The Flow Builder tool can also be configured to guide customers to relevant departments (e.g. menswear, womenswear, homeware). For example, a telephony structure can be implemented to transfer customers to specific agents who can offer expert or personalised responses. Again, allowing your team to utilise their skills for more important tasks.
The best retail customer service software for your business
Live support is time consuming, often requiring the same responses repeatedly. As you grow and acquire more customers it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to maintain high quality support through agents alone. Whether your customer is looking for a fast answer or a low effort answer, Zendesk Messaging can help you provide it.
Configuring workflows in Flow Builder, connecting it to the Messaging platform, and providing front-end support through intelligent and logical responses is game changing – especially when it comes to managing customers during Peak.
Most recently, we have helped a number of well-known retail brands integrate Zendesk Messaging with existing back-office systems to create enhanced customer communication and engagement. This will lift a huge amount of pressure from the Customer Support teams by giving customers the ability to get rapid responses to order-related queries with ‘zero-touch’.
Smoother interactions with customers are only possible if you have the ability to provide customers with rapid, accurate responses in the channel of their choosing. This in turn requires a single interactive interface that combines AI and agent support to best effect.
It’s becoming increasingly evident that Zendesk Messaging is the future. Taking advantage of this platform now will lift your online presence to a higher level, create a fantastic customer shopping experience and boost your CSAT scores during even the busiest times of the retail year.
To find out more about how Appamondo can help your company benefit from chatbot technology, get in touch today.
